Berenberg, the privately owned German bank, is hiring. The Financial Times reports that the firm has aspirations to grow in both London and New York, that it wants to ‘disrupt in the UK market and be more active in deals, block trades and IPOs’, that it’s launching a US trading desk, and that it wants to up its coverage of European stocks from 600 to 725.

Berenberg declined to elaborate further on these aspirations, saying that it’s still in the ‘planning process’, but a brief look at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Register suggests the bank has been hiring already – and from some of its larger rivals.

In August, for example, Berenberg hired Conrad Bartos, an analyst who’d spent three years at Goldman Sachs since joining from University College London in 2012. At Goldman, Bartos worked in IBD. At Berenberg, he’ll be in equity research.

Bartos isn’t Berenberg’s only hire from a bigger name. The bank also poached Lindsay Arnold, a ‘corporate access originator’ who’d spent nine years at Citi. And it plucked out Alastair Reid, a senior media analyst at UBS, and converted him into an airlines analyst instead. Meanwhile, Berenberg just hired six people for its US equities sales desk, although not from quite such prestigious rivals.